Discovery Concept Guide

Finding Opportunities

Identifying Opportunities

“Opportunity” is the term we use in HCD to refer to areas of need in our service offerings.

You find opportunities by viewing your insights through the lens of your organization’s business offerings or capabilities. Literally, opportunities are the fields in which your organization can innovate and offer new or revised products, services, and systems.

Diagrammatic illustration of finding insights. The team finds insights when they pass the raw research they gathered through the lens of their problem frame or brief.

Why Find Opportunities?

We work to identify opportunities because they reveal real needs that we heard expressed by participants during the research phase.

Let’s be clear. Opportunities are not solutions. Opportunities pave the way towards solutions. Opportunities identify an area within a service system that needs to be addressed and made better. Opportunities identify the exact problem we’re trying to solve.

Once an opportunity is identified, we can either extend the team’s support to address that opportunity or we can share recommendations for addressing the matter with our internal and external partners. By identifying and pursuing opportunities, your agency can apply energy and resources to those areas with the highest need and/or to those areas that could have the maximum positive impact on the lives of your customers.

What Do Opportunities Look Like?

Opportunities can surface at many points in surface and in a vareity of modalities for your organization. A few places opportunities might surface include:

  • Touchpoints: This is where the research team maps specific points wherein the customer or employee interacts with the agency.
  • Root Issues: This is where the research team identifies the root cause of complicated challenges, even if the root cause is multifaceted and complex.
  • Important Moments: This is where the research team identifies those moments that matter most to customers as they interact with the agency.
  • Best Practices: This is where the research team identifies where in the agency people are doing it right, towards the goal of spreading these best practices more broadly.
  • Pain Points: This is where the research team identifies where the customer or employee experiences a problem in the system.